I spend most of my time working on programs, and the programs I'm currently working on are (in my mind, anyhow) bigtime winners.
Unfortunately, the stuff we create is usually not marching to the current education drummer. Like writing according to that horseshit idiom "Writing is a process." The process is to brainstorm, write, rewrite, re-rewrite, edit, and publish, or something along those lines. This is among the more brain-dead approaches you could take to teach writing effectively. Why? Because, you want to give kids the idea that they can write as fluently as they talk. Yes, Virginia, they have to learn some conventions. But the main goal of the program should be to let them express themselves on a topic—without straying in a manner that creates conventionally acceptable prose. In other words, they do it fast. Today they complete a piece; tomorrow they complete another, and both of them are pretty good. How do you do that? The answer is you provide kids with templates that are in standard English and that help them with the parts of an essay they typically screw up. They copy the rote parts and make up the rest. Then they read what they've written out loud and realize that it sounds pretty good.
This is the basic approach Bonnie Grossen and I are using in an exit writing program. This program would be designed to teach the kind of stuff kids have to write to pass a high school writing exit exam. Fail the exam and you don't graduate.
When we were field-testing the program, we had kids write on the topic, "What do you think about high school exit tests for math or writing?" My, they wrote some very spirited responses and they made some very good points, like "You passed US in math. How could you do that and now you tell us we gotta pass another test or we don't graduate? If we don't graduate, that's your problem—you passed us in math."
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hmmmm....
Templates.
They Say/I Say has templates.
I like templates.
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